LAT: Europe trains' history of intrigue isn't over

DISPATCH FROM BRUSSELS
Europe trains' history of intrigue isn't over

Joel Saget AFP/Getty Images

http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2009-06/47630040.jpg
Two commuters walk on a deserted platform at the Gare du Nord, the
northbound train station in Paris.

Popularized in fiction between the wars as places for skulduggery and
worse, trains and their stations have played a key role in modern-day
plotting and attacks by Islamic terrorists.

By Sebastian Rotella
LOS ANGELES TIMES
June 22, 2009

Like many spy tales in fiction and reality, "Background to Danger"
begins in a train station.

A down-and-out freelance journalist awaits a night train alone on a
platform in Nuremberg, Germany, hands in overcoat pockets, shoulders
hunched against a November wind. Soon a frightened Russian offers him
cash to smuggle documents across the Austrian border, and the plot
steams into a labyrinth of treachery.

The 1937 novel by Eric Ambler was part of a genre that explored Europe
between wars, a cloak-and-dagger underworld where trains recur as a
motif. "Stamboul Train" by Graham Greene depicts death and espionage
aboard the Orient Express. In Alfred Hitchcock's film version of John
Buchan's "The 39 Steps," the hero -- framed for murder by foreign
agents -- dodges police on a train in Scotland.

Fast-forward six decades into a transformed landscape. Europe has
erased internal borders. Instead of fighting Nazis or communists, spy
agencies use satellites and wiretaps to track Islamic terrorists who
conspire on the Internet.

But one thing has not changed much. Trains, stations and the gritty
neighborhoods that surround them are often the backdrop to danger.

Rail passengers were slaughtered in terrorist bombings in Paris in
1995 and Madrid nine years later. On a foggy Tuscan morning in 2003, a
police ID check in a second-class compartment set off a point-blank
shootout with a Red Brigades militant, the author of a manifesto
proclaiming a leftist-Islamic militant alliance. Her companion and a
police officer died.

And it was aboard a train to Paris that a Moroccan Belgian informant
decided on a risky gambit after departing the Gare du Midi station
here in the Belgian capital: Fearing betrayal by a handler, he
surrendered to police and announced he was a spy. After his French and
Belgian spymasters reconciled with him, they sent him on an undercover
mission to Al Qaeda's Afghan camps, according to his book "Inside the
Jihad," written under the alias Omar Nasiri.

Spies, terrorists, smugglers and other stealthy types use trains in
Western Europe because they are fast, cheap and efficient. Unlike
airports, rail travel also offers anonymity: Authorities don't
routinely check papers, search luggage or use metal detectors.

Moreover, train stations tend to be in working-class immigrant areas
where desperadoes find shelter, weapons, false documents and other
tools of the trade. The Gare du Midi, on the southern edge of downtown
Brussels, is a good example. A few Spanish and Italian shops remain
from previous migrations, but the personality of the neighborhood
today is Moroccan and Turkish.

Lined by flower boxes and weathered facades, the Boulevard Maurice
Lemonnier is the bustling main drag. Campaign posters of local
politicians with first names like Ahmed and Fatima adorn a fish
market, a halal butcher shop, a music shop blaring desert rhythms, a
combination discount men's store and travel agency.

Although this may not be the best sidewalk to stop and count cash, it
is not bleak or menacing either. You have to know the secret history
of this placid, cosmopolitan city to realize how many cases of
skulduggery intersect in these few blocks.

At the Dar es Salaam, a hotel and tea house on a corner of the
boulevard, hulking "shoe bomber" Richard Reid lay low in 2001 before
taking the train to Paris and trying to bring down a Miami-bound jet
with explosives-packed high-tops.

A few doors away at Le Nil, an Egyptian restaurant, police raids the
same year uncovered a basement stockpile of bomb materials that an Al
Qaeda cell had prepared for a plot against a U.S. target.

The clientele in the kebab joints, sidewalk cafes and restaurants is
mostly male. The ambience ranges from industrious and respectable to
furtive and thuggish. The latter probably marked the world of
Abdelkader Belliraj, 52, a Belgian of Moroccan descent who has
admitted to spying for Belgian intelligence and is now on trial in
Morocco on a long list of charges.

For 20 years, Belliraj held court around here. He drank tea and ate
couscous while allegedly hatching multimillion-dollar holdups, arms
deals, money-laundering schemes and terrorist plots.

Prosecutors also accuse Belliraj of six murders, including political
assassinations. But one killing was allegedly an act of punitive
fundamentalism: a 53-year-old gay man gunned down because he picked up
young Arabs around the Gare du Midi.

The crowds of travelers in the station, a hub for high-speed lines to
Paris and London, are largely oblivious to this geography of intrigue.
The architecture is functional, boxy and modern, lacking the ornate
historic charm of stations in other capitals.

In 2005, a militant named Mohammed Reha held a sit-down at a train
station in Brussels -- it's not clear which one -- with the wife of an
imprisoned terrorism suspect. The woman said that she and other wives
of jailed extremists were ready to commit suicide bombings for Al
Qaeda, according to his confession. Reha promised to put her in touch
with a chief of the network, but he was soon arrested in Morocco and
convicted in 2007 on terrorism charges.

Reha's lawyers insist that the case was "fiction" concocted by
unscrupulous authorities: a spy story. Either way, it features a
colorful detail. Reha told interrogators that, as a precaution, he and
the woman did not talk aloud about her offer to die for the cause.
Instead, they sat and exchanged written notes.

In a train station, after all, you never know who might be listening.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationwo...0,174926.story

Muggle wrote:
DISPATCH FROM BRUSSELS
Europe trains' history of intrigue isn't over

Joel Saget AFP/Getty Images


I was there yesterday. They'll have to update the stry to allow for the
new-found gentrification.

http://www.brusselscreativity.be/en/...s/gare-du-midi

M
http://www.cannes-or-bust.com/